The little whistle from outside yesterday, could only be Philippe le Rigolo. I stick my head out the window, and there he is looking as usual like a big cartoon parrot with his hooked nose, head shaved bald, and malicious smile. The second story is so low that we could almost shake hands. We actually do shake hands almost every day.
First he politely asks if he had waked me up. It's already 2pm but now I'm retired, he affects to believe all I do is sleep. (The other day he told our guests who arrived in our absence--complete strangers to him--not to ring the doorbell for fear of waking us up. They looked at each other aghast.)
Philippe tells me in English that the police are looking for me for visa violation. His accent is so thick that it's momentarily hard to read him but I automatically assume it's a gag. And sure enough, there's this dude down there dressed up with a badge, smokey hat, and cruiser. I stick my hand out and drawl "Howdy, partn'r" Blank look: this guy doesn't speak a word of American and has only spent about 4 days total in America in his whole life, in New York, 30 years ago when he was in the Navy.
But he's got this "passion", as he rightly called it, for country American culture. The fake cop car and the strange attempts at cop outfit are mainly meant for for the big country music festival held over in the Gers, east of us, every summer. They happen in a town named Mirande so I attempted some feeble joke about Mirande Rights. Completely blank look but it turned out maybe he had seen enough dubbed movies to have the general idea.
It sounded like the others at this festival were equally removed from the reality of American culture except where it really mattered, food. "Do you all eat American food?" Compassionate smile, looking down at his shoes, little laugh "Bien sûr que non." he said emphatically. "We mostly eat foie gras and confit de canard, you know, southwestern French food." They may be a bit daffy but they're not completely insane.
Isaac Bashevis Singer was asked in an interview how he could come up with so many compelling plots. He said he always started by imagining someone with a simple passion of any kind--stamp collecting, anything at all, large or small. Passion fascinates us whether or not we share it or even comprehend its object.
This guy's day job is driving a Brink's truck .
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Speaking of incomprehensible passions, it was also yesterday that everybody else in town except André the mayor was competing in a huge boules tournament. How do they get the word out? I didn't see any posters. The three regular boules courts with their leveled out hard sand surface were packed but in addition, pretty much every street except for the two main drags were taken over by players, potholes, humps and all. I had tossed all our recycling and trash into the Kangoo and, when I saw the crowds at the square, detoured to the most remote poubelles to drop it off. In the short time that it took me to sort out the trash, a game of boules had sprung up in front of and another one behind the Kangoo. I thought maybe they were kidding me but no, the tape measures were already out in both games, measuring the distance of a softball sized throwing balls to the "little pig" (cochonette) . I had to straddle a couple of balls with the Kangoo wheels while slowly rolling out. Nobody was into moving them out of my way temporarily. Maybe they are more passionate about winning points than it has always seemed. I always thought it was a game requiring a huge amount of conversation. Yesterday I saw a lot of silent players concentrating.
